1. The production of history

A powerful agent in the production of history has been the
state. The role of modernist intellectuals in defining rational,
bureaucratic national cultures has been much discussed. Under
these conditions, the production of 'history', in the sense of
school textbooks, archives, museums and national monuments
assumes epidemic proportions, underpinning claims for political
legimacy and territorial sovereignty through narratives of
immanence, immutability and inevitability. In this kind of
history, everything becomes involved in some kind of archival
project, snapping at the heels of the present, as Pierre Nora has
memorably put it (1989). The state has therefore been of
particularly significance in creating forms of historical
consciousness which are pervasive, if not always entirely
persuasive. Indeed, this kind of history is seldom uncontested in
some way or another. The role of those intellectuals who have
attempted to undermine or maintain alternatives to the state
project are often 'forgotten'; (this, of course, being an active
process) in historical writing which is, by and large, the
product of the state itself. It is also easy to forget those
factors unconsidered by ideologues which render the best laid
reformist plans unworkable. It is still all too easy, in other
words, to take reformist intellectuals at their word.

In contemporary Turkey a nationalist ideology (Kemalism)
focussed on the figure of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk has provided the
basic parameters within which the past can be experienced. It has
constrained these experiences, but not completely defined them.
If we approach ideology as a set of loosely coordinated
practices, based on distinct and socially embedded techniques of
writing, seeing, reading and interpretation, then the closure
implied by an ideological system (such as Kemalism) gives way to
a world of plural meanings shaped by the meeting of text and a
variety of social actors - a world of anomaly, contradiction and
ambiguity. As Can Kozanoglu has recently pointed out, Kemalism is
now 'read' in so many ways that it is almost impossible to define
(Kozanoglu 1995). The old language of centre and periphery which
once dominated Turkish studies is now entirely impossible to
sustain.

Music history writing, as I hope to show, throws a
particularly interesting light on these complexities. The
specific concern of this chapter is the ways in which modernist
intellectuals are currently seeking to reappropriate a genre of
music that has been demonised as part of the wider process of
modernist nationalism. Turkish art music was the subject of an
ideological onslaught in the 1920s and 1930s in the hands of
modernising Kemalist elites who saw it as the relic of a
barbarous Ottoman past. In the hands of nationalist musicologists
such as Mahmut Ragip Gazimihal, Halil Bedi Yönetken, Muzaffer
Sarisözen, a reconstructed folk ('halk') music provided the
basis for a national music. This was adumbrated through state
funded research projects, conference reports, new musicological
journals, and the results were subsequently much promoted by the
Turkish radio and later television.

The efforts of these intellectuals has been inspired by the
fact that this process of reform has been, in certain ways, a
failure. At the most general level, the problem of 'writing
music' has been confronted most directly and influentially by
Charles Seeger, who noted the epistemological problem of
converting the logic of one system of communication (music) into
another (speech) (Seeger 1960). From this point of view alone,
the attempt to construct a coherent Kemalist musical project was
from the outset marked by the problematic engagement of a
logocentric political philosophy (language, indeed, was the
driving metaphor of the state's reforms) with the messy and
evasive world of musical sound, and, of course, musicians. But
the state's musicology and the world it tried to summon into
existence also conformed to deeply rooted notions of decree and
command, and the elitist view that the mass of the Turkish people
had so little in the way of 'real' (that is to say, a racially
conceived notion of 'pure Turkish') culture, that anything that
they came up with was likely to be gratefully accepted. This was
not the case, and musical reformism was easily resisted. And, in
simple practical terms, the state's bureaucratic efforts to
reform musical culture were disorganised. The state's official
musicology has thus never engaged with the musical world
inhabited by most people living in Turkey. Throughout the 1980s
this musicology was discursively organised around the 'threat' of
a popular genre known as 'Arabesk', although it never attempted
to engage with it as a serious intellectual issue. It is in this
gap, between discursive evocation and serious critical engagement
of officially condemned genres, that one must situate the new
Ottomanist scholarship.

Tatlises is one of the most conspicuous
and successful Arabesk singers of recent years. The
intense vocal qualities and group of violins instantly
mark this performance as Arabesk to any Turkish listener.
The recording comes from a live CD (Fosforlu Cevriyem),
released in 1990.

The relevant 'other' in this musicology has been the 'urban'
art music genre. The distinction drawn between the art music
genre and the state's constructed rural folk music was
underpinned by a general set of oppostions between city and
village, between Turkish and Arab, between a racially conceived
notion of 'culture' and Islamic 'civilization', between people
and palace. Before setting foot in Turkey as a research student,
I had been thoroughly schooled in this kind of binary operation.
Its ideological nature soon became fairly clear to me, but, given
the ever present signifiers of the state tradition (busts of
Ataturk, monumental architectural modernism of a nationalist
kind, slogans spelled out in white stone on mountainsides and cut
into forests) I was constantly taken aback during my fieldwork by
the ways in which these distinctions were either ignored, or
brought self consciously into provocative proximity.

Two brief illustrations from my fieldwork experience will
illustrate the point. The first concerns the world in which I
learned makam (modal theory) and the kanun. My kanun
teacher was a low ranking officer in the Turkish army who had
taken early retirement on health grounds, and worked both as a
musician in gazino clubs and as an administrator in a private
housing co-operative in Üsküdar (1).
This housing co-operative - part of a major movement in Istanbul
following the spiralling cost of property and massive rural-urban
migration in the 1980s - was entirely run by retired army
officers who were all passionate devotees of Turkish art music.
My teacher was a close friend of a serving army colonel who made
kanuns in his spare time. In recent years he has become one of a
small handful of kanun makers in Istanbul, selling his
instruments in Germany and the Middle East as well as Turkey. The
extent of these men's commitment to what is often described as an
Ottoman culture, branded in certain registers of reformist
discourse (mentioned above) as decadent, elitist, Islamic and so
on, was initially a matter of great surprise. It was, to me at
least, as if this music allowed them to maintain memories that
they knew they had to forget.

The other moment relates to a more specific incident. I spent
an afternoon watching preparations for a traditional folk dancing
contest in Pendik (2) with a
group of friends. The 'folklor' in question is the danced
equivalent of the nationalist 'halk' music mentioned
above, emerging in the same ideological 'moment'. They were all
from the Eastern Black Sea area, an area that prides itself on
loyalty to Ataturk during the struggle for independence, an on
the absence of corrupting urbanism conferred, in their own
self-representations, by climate, topography and distance from
cities: loyalty to the state, its reforms and the Turkish flag
were constantly asserted. During such folklore festivals, this
kind of self-celebratory language appeared to me, at least, to
run riot. Later, we emerged from the school hall in which the
practice was taking place, ate from a stall in the street and
then sat in a cafe looking over the sea of Marmara to Istanbul's
islands on a perfect moonlit night. A central theme running
through the Turkish art music repertory of sarki relates to the
genteel pleasures of the beauty spots of the main imperial
cities, Istanbul and Izmir, (Heybeli, Çamlica, Kalamis,
Göksu...), all ideally seen in moonlight. Popular urban genres
began to refer to the city in the late Tanzimat period, when new
public transport systems made trips to such places possible, and
the quality and visual order of the urban environment, in a time
of rapid social change, became a matter of intellectual concern
(Mitchell 1991). Since the 1940s and 50s, songs about the city,
particularly those of Munir Nureddin Selçuk, have enjoyed
enduring popularity. On this particular occasion, the combination
of high spirits and the beautiful moonlight unleashed an
exuberant performance of these popular 'art music' songs that
went on until the other customers in the cafe eventually asked
them to quieten down. Juxtaposed as it was to an afternoon of
rampant Kemalism, this was, for me, a striking and memorable
moment.